Giovanni Giacometti (1868-1933)

Winterlandschaft, 1910
Oil on canvas, 38 x 46 cm
Permanent loan from private ownership

The small but painterly immensely charming picture is carefully composed in horizontal layers. In the foreground of the deeply snow-covered landscape masses of snow piles up, behind which the dwelling situated parallel to the picture threatens to drown. The middle ground bordered by the forest edge rises up behind it, from which the view onto the mountains and the horizon opens up, vaulted over by a dramatically agitated sky. Attention is primarily drawn to the ochre-coloured face of the building, the chimney and the two almost identical, graded mountaintops, which give the horizontal structure an opposing vertical accent.

Around 1906/07 Giovanni Giacometti and his painter friend Cuno Amiet are extensively preoccupied with Vincent van Gogh’s painting. The influence manifests itself - beside the fauvist colour scheme - in the rough, energetic brush stroke with its short, impetuously set patches of colour. Unlike van Gogh’s impulsive, ecstatic way of painting, Giacometti’s brush strokes follow a well-thought-out structural order effecting pictorial design.

What constitutes the picture, however, is the insistently flickering play of light, the suggestive evocation of winter cold and warming sun as well as the aspect of coloured shadows and brilliant reflexes. Here Giacometti works with the traditional illuminating light: The sun shining outside the picture plane throws its light from the top right-hand side onto the landscape. All the same Giacometti like Claude Monet conceives light as a substance, which should touch us emotionally. The light appears coloured, although refracted in the white of the snow, and is composed of the six glowing colours of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. The snow landscape is quasi disintegrated into pure colours, and the apparent colour of the atmospheric reflexes replaces the traditional local colour. The artist heightens the light intensity additionally by applying vigorous complementary contrasts: So the purple in the foreground is evenly intermingled with intensive yellow colour blotches, or the pink intermingles with the warm yellow and the cold blue.

For the new pictorial understanding following on Impressionism the use of pure, strong colours as well as the concept of the picture as autonomous plane were fundamental innovations. Consequently a new solution had to be found for the traditional illuminating light. Giacometti’s winter landscape no longer has anything in common with traditional tonality. The growing autonomy of the painting media now went hand in hand with a striking colourful appearance and the sheer blinding luminosity of the picture.

Beat Stutzer